Toscanini: Musician of Conscience
The biography of the great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) by Harvey Sachs was considered definitive when it was published in 1978. Sachs, who has devoted a lifetime of scholarship to the study of the life and career of Toscanini, has now published a new biography, Toscanini: Musician of Conscience (Norton 2016), that is far more than an update of his earlier book.
Instead, it stands as a landmark among the biographies of musicians. At almost 900 pages of text, and benefitting from a treasure trove of archival material made available since its predecessor was published, the new biography sets new standards in comprehensiveness, not to mention readability. Quite simply, it is unique among books of its kind.
Early Career in Opera
Toscanini’s career as a conductor was launched when at the age of 19 he was called upon to conduct a performance of Aida in Rio de Janeiro where he had been playing cello in the orchestra. He soon was conducting in various Italian theaters until he was appointed in 1898 artistic director of La Scala in Milan, then as now Italy’s leading opera house. He built La Scala’s repertoire on the operas of Verdi and Wagner and the Italian premieres of such foreign operas as Eugene Onegin and Pelleas et Melisande.
He was a champion of the works of his friend Alfredo Catalani (whose operas are largely forgotten today), and those of Puccini, whose artistry he admired but with whom he had a difficult relationship. Toscanini’s standards were uncompromising. He attended personally to the smallest details of staging, coached singers himself, and materially raised the level of performance of the orchestra. Many of his innovations in the way opera were performed and viewed in the theater by the public are considered conventional today.
The Met and La Scala
In 1908 he accepted the invitation of his former colleague at La Scala, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, to become artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. For the next seven years, he ruled over the most dazzling collection of star singers in the Met’s history (Caruso, Scotti, Farrar, Destin, et al.). As an uncompromising perfectionist, he found himself at odds with the Met’s management and returned to his native Italy in 1915.
He reigned supreme over a reorganized La Scala from 1920 until 1929, when he took the company on a triumphant tour to Vienna and Berlin. He left La Scala and his homeland during the 1930s when Mussolini became dictator and Hitler seized power in Germany. As an artist of conscience, he could not abide the suppression of the arts and the appalling treatment of Jews by the fascist regimes of the time. He never conducted opera again except for guest appearances at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals before Hitler’s regime seized control of those great venues.
H3>Return to America
Toscanini returned to the United States where he became the principal conductor and artistic director first of the New York Philharmonic and later of the NBC Orchestra that was founded by NBC’s head, David Sarnoff, as a vehicle for Toscanini’s radio broadcasts. At its peak, the NBC Orchestra’s audience for its Saturday evening broadcasts was enormous — a larger proportion of the listening audience than that commanded on television today by the Super Bowl
Profile of a Genius
Toscanini was a musical genius, but he also had a nearly insatiable libido. His wife Carla apparently tolerated his dalliances, of which there were many. Sachs discusses Toscanini’s life in all its complexity. At the same time, we get a thorough look at a musical period of extraordinary accomplishment. Many of the leading musical figures of the times in New York and Europe appear in this marvelous account of a musical figure who towered above his contemporaries, both in the genius of his artistry and his popularity with the public. The tale is well told in this new biography of Toscanini by Harvey Sachs.
Toscanini: Musician of Conscience
by Harvey Sachs
hardcover 944 pp.
Norton, 2016
